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*rainbowstar*
Posts : 55 Join date : 2013-04-13 Location : exile
| Subject: Graffiti & Girls Mon May 20, 2013 12:17 am | |
| Graffiti & GirlsBanksy is maybe the only graffiti artist ever to achieve household name recognition. His anonymous anti-establishment B&W stencil pieces have been spotted around the World; he boasts legal exhibitions with his stuff going to peeps like Kate Moss and John Travolta for upwards of a quarter-million pounds; and, there's even a movie about him: Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010. Banksy, August, 2005
Totally subalturn, it makes sense that one of Banksy's very most landmark pieces is of... a little girl: the very most hard-core rebellious tag that any subversive could identify with. So it was very apt, when on August 5th, 2005 the Global Community awoke to find a little girl had appeared, written by Banksy, on the 700 kilometer Security Barrier that is rapidly dividing the pariah Palestinians from Israel. Braided: maybe an allusion to Astrid Lindgren's little anarchist heroine Pippi Longstocking, the small girl holds to eight balloons that lift her off. She's an almost impossible lightness in what is known for being an often weighty place, in a sometimes very heavy world. Another artist has also tweaked the graffiti art genre to achieve some legitimacy for the otherwise criminal art. Kevin Peterson, based in Houston, Texas transferred wild-style scripts, tags, and “bombed”-out urban spaces to canvas, and used it with corrugated metal as a background for the wickedest rebel icon: little girls... posing, strolling, smiling, or mostly just chillin'. “Discompose”, Kevin Peterson, February, 2011
Kevin's style is photo-realistic, causing one critic, Arseny Vesnin, to compare his work to Jacques-Louis David. The exquisitely rendered cutest fresh vivacious little girls against a backdrop of rough and raged street art-urban decay and industrial metals sets up a big contrast between the purest innocence and the trashest breakdown. Kevin writes, “It's about growing up and living in a world that is broken. These paintings are about trauma, fear and loneliness and the strength that it takes to survive and thrive. They each contain the contrast of the untainted, young and innocent against a backdrop of a worn, ragged, and defiled world.” Kevin describes himself in interview with Michelle Markelz as having a soft spot for kids and it shows. We can easily tune-in and empathize with the inner-worlds of the girls in his figurative foregrounds. Each girl is solo, alone on the canvas; sometimes melancholy, mostly sober if not grim; a few maybe hesitant smiles. Kevin says, “My work deals with isolation, loneliness and longing teamed with a level of optimistic hope.”
“Alone II”, Kevin Peterson No mention of sexoageism exactly, but maybe it's in between the lines? Beautiful words from Kevin, “Issues of race and the division of wealth have arisen in my recent work. This work deals with the idea of rigid boundaries, the hopeful breakdown of such restrictions, as well as questions about the forces that orchestrate our behavior.” (These quotes come from Kevin's standard artist statement to which he typically varies the final line to suit the show.) Recognizing his precise vision of innocence juxtaposed against hardness, Kevin bites Banksy's iconic Security Barrier Pippi Longstocking-esque girl many times in his work. “Graffiti Girls” series, Kevin Peterson
“Graffiti Girls” series, March, 2010, Kevin Peterson
“Waiting II”, March, 2010, Kevin Peterson
“Float III”, Kevin Peterson
“A person who decides to go out and paint illegal graffiti and “deface” other people’s property was once an innocent child as well but something happened along the way and they developed into someone who was willing to break laws and social norms to express themselves in such a way.”
- Kevin Peterson
...And sometimes that person who is willing to “break…social norms to express themselves” still really is a child! If the image of a small graffiti girl is rebellious, a lil' girl who writes graffiti must be revolutionary... Solveign Barlow, November 29, 2007
Called the “New” or “Female Banksy” by British media, school girl ten year-old Solveig Barlow writes legal on wastelands around her Brighton home. While supported by her (magazine) writer father Paul and mother Heidi, she isn't coached by them; speaking of her muse Solveig told The Sun, “I’m not sure where I get my inspiration. I must just have a good imagination.” Solveig, which means “sun beam” in Norwegian, uses SOL as her tag. Solveign Barlow, March 23, 2009
After the spirit of Banksy a year-and-a-half earlier, SOL gets-up at the Berlin wall. Solveign Barlow, November 27, 2007
Graffiti is a subversive art: frequently anonymous, the expression of the alienated and disaffected, its messages tend to anti-establishment in form and content. But the most dissident piece or artist of all, shows up to be... the little girl. | |
| | | Mayflow Starfleet Commander
Posts : 341 Join date : 2009-05-20
| Subject: Re: Graffiti & Girls Mon May 20, 2013 6:18 am | |
| OMG!! That is really excellent artistry! | |
| | | *rainbowstar*
Posts : 55 Join date : 2013-04-13 Location : exile
| Subject: Re: Graffiti & Girls Tue Jun 04, 2013 9:50 am | |
| Graffiti & Girls: AppendixThe ultimate dissident philosophy is cute, fun, colorful, playful, and readily forgives; it's vulnerable, fragile, sincere, and cries easily. That is what is most threatening to the heaviness of the world. That is what is most defended against, poked fun of, and even criminalized. Kevin Peterson
“Into the Light ”, Kevin Peterson
Out-of-doors artist and social activist Kieth Haring's “radiant babies” are bit by Kevin in his “Into the Light”. Openly gay, Kieth was outspoken on gender and sexuality issues. He died of AIDS-related complications young, just 31. “Hope”, Kevin Peterson
”Kevin Peterson has a way with color that is so magnetizing and utterly perfect that at your first glance you see a photograph, at second glance you begin to realize it’s truth, by the third you are right in the middle of his brilliantly executed contrasted world of struggle and hope. Peterson has a clear depiction of the struggles of life ... but it is his undertone of optimism and vulnerability that has kept our attention.” - Erin Leigh
The little girl in “Hope” is Ruby Bridges, bit from Norman Rockwell's integration painting: “The Problem We All Live With”; she is a symbol of overcoming, reminding us that the dreams of movement and acceptance from earlier periods of art history still have hope, and are found living today in that same mediums. While at the time, six year-old Ruby Bridges represented the breakdown of racist segregation; today, this little girl might mean the equally powerful and punitive ageosexist membranations that maintain the norms and taboos of contemporary capitalopatriarchy. Norman's painting was printed in 1964 Look, since he had ended his contract with The Saturday Evening Post the previous year due to their unwillingness to accommodate his political expressions. Kevin Peterson
“Teddy”, Kevin Peterson
“Bubbles”, Kevin Peterson
“Today, instead of trying to help solve social problems, he prefers to portray them in paint. “I’ve always enjoyed painting the figure,” Peterson says. “Maybe my interest in humans on a psychological level has influenced it. People fascinate me. And I enjoy the challenge of painting flesh and portrait work. … [W]hen I achieve that life like feel, I find painting the figure very rewarding.”” - Bonnie Gangelhoff
Long ago hardened against the glyph of the adult face and figure, every form of psychological defense thrown up against it's affective expressions, the little girl still evokes for us our ultimate humanity, sensitivity, and impermanence in an infinitely tender Universe. Egoic consciousness, meshed into the mechanation of the big world, hates and despises what is sweet and soft and warm-hearted. Kindness and caring melt the ego and it's defenses. That's why a harmless little girl is the most threatening to the System of any rebel insignia: she is trans-political, she dissolves the vast hard defenses of the statist war-machine and it's cogs. Unlike ordinary signs, little girls are not absurd and dead arbitrary signifiers readable only as code; she disarms everyone universally and immediately being a symbol of gentleness and goodhearted irreverence. Banksy
Banksy
Banksy
“As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on day trips with the art departments.”
- Banksy
And Solveign Barlow is definitely one school-girl worth taking a looking at.... Solveign Barlow, October 1, 2007
Solveign Barlow, April 14, 2009
In and through Solveign Barlow there is a radical going over of traditional subject-object dichotomy in Western history of art. The little girl who had appeared as an image in the outsider art of graffiti writers, standing for the total subversion of all egoic and worldly hardened defenses, comes to life off the concrete walls and corrugated metal, and writes for herself the anti-establishment graffiti -- the word from beyond the System -- from whence she had come. Solveign Barlow
Last edited by *rainbowstar* on Tue Jun 04, 2013 11:07 am; edited 1 time in total | |
| | | Mayflow Starfleet Commander
Posts : 341 Join date : 2009-05-20
| Subject: Re: Graffiti & Girls Tue Jun 04, 2013 10:49 am | |
| Dissy is always welcome here. The world is too full of drab thinkers, so the new and the wild spirited free-thinkers have to increase their prowess incessantly. | |
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